Trust

I attempted to walk in to my eldest's bedroom the other day but stopped as I decided it would be too uncomfortable for my feet.  The carpet had morphed from a lovely wool one to one of Lego, it was completely covered.  I walked away more than slightly baffled as we had been away for almost a week then I remembered for two of the days just before going away we had the same two children over to play.  Two children who never fail to make my house look like a whirlwind has been through,  almost every toy my youngest owns, which is not a huge amount were out on her floor at one point whilst they were here.  Whilst my children do scatter items all over the house it is never a huge volume, they play for hours, sometimes days with the same few toys these same two children flit from one thing to another not really settling and well, making a huge mess.  We have recently spent a few days away with this same family and I have now come to realise why these children play as they do.

As parents we are raising the next generation giving them the skills to go out into the world and stand on their own two feet.  As humans we have one of the longest periods of development to this stage in the animal kingdom so we have plenty of time to get it wrong right, if we know what is right that is, there are no opportunities to turn back the clock and do things over again.  But that does not mean that we should give up hope that we can ever do a good enough job provided we do learn from our own mistakes and not end up sounding like a stuck record which is what I listened to for so much of my time away.

To trust your child is, in my opinion, one of the hardest aspects of parenting and one that can only come from trusting yourself.  If you yourself were not trusted as a child then it makes trusting others very difficult.  If I had a pound for every time I have heard it said of a child, but I can't trust them I would be a rich lady now.  Hearing these words always makes me sad, sad for the adult speaking them and for the child they are speaking of.  Trust is not something you can teach children, they have to learn, they have to be given the space to get on with their life but within the safety net of you as a parent.  If you keep the net too tight, too restricting then the child will most likely react.  How they react will differ from child to child, they may be aggressive physically or verbally, run away from you constantly, feel like they never listen, be destructive, either way their behaviour is likely to challenge you, probably to tighten the net further still.  So a tight net is one, for me, that makes for difficult listening, of frustrated children who are unsettled and maybe destructive and how these two children behave most of the time.  They are not trusted and that makes me sad.